Paper by Kobi Hackenburg, Caroline Wagner, Luke Hewitt, Ben M. Tappin, Ed Saunders, Hannah Rose Kirk, Helen Margetts, Christopher Summerfield:
Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI’s advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI’s advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI’s advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.
More here.
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Who is in control of the image? This question is at home in the work of Thomas Demand (b. 1964). The German artist pays meticulous attention to the execution of his sculptural and photographic work. But also as a viewer, while looking at the public images in news- and other feeds, he is interested in the decisions that have been made before we get to see a photo. The two worlds are not unrelated.
“Reflections on Exile” summoned to mind the only seven words my grandfather ever said to me about Ireland, where he had cousins he never knew: “I don’t think I’ll go back there,” he muttered one day in the 1990s, in response to my prodding. He had visited, seen family, kissed the stone, and got in a car accident (my parents said he was distracted). I wondered what Herlihys in Cork thought of how he pronounced our surname. What they thought of Puerto Rico and Martha’s Vineyard, the islands where he chose to live. The reaction in their eyes and in his, the confusion wrought by exile and empire, Americanization and the impossibility of return.
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No women in England aged 20 to 24 died of cervical 
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T
How do you catch a unique bird?
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